Contribution of suppression difficulty and lessons learned in forecasting fire suppression operations productivity: A methodological approach

We propose an economic analysis using utility and productivity,and efficiency theories to provide fire managers a decision supporttool to determine the most efficient fire management programs lev-els. By incorporating managers’ accumulated fire suppression expe-riences (capitalized experience) in the analysis we help fire man-agers determine fire suppression productivity and efficient budgetallocation. Furthermore, monitoring of the management index (MI)helps identify operational deficiencies in the different districtswhere the analysis is applied. This is so because internally the areacontraction factor (ACF) provides information regarding the effec-tiveness of fire suppression operations by including a comparisonratio between the area affected and the potential fire area withoutsuppression actions. We used the Almonaster fire that occurred in2008 in the Huelva Province, Spain as a case study to test the appli-cability of the methodology. Our evaluation showed that the com-binations of firefighting resources assigned to the Almonaster fireresulted in a fire suppression efficiency of only 33%, measured as theratio between damages avoided and suppression costs involved.